


As Big as a House

by knitwrit



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Animal Death, Character Death, Child Death, Eating Disorders, Ecology, Environment, F/M, Global Warming, Grief/Mourning, Miscarriage, POV Luna Lovegood, Postpartum Depression, Stillbirth, Whales
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:24:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22840177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knitwrit/pseuds/knitwrit
Summary: Luna mourns a loss and swims with a whale
Kudos: 9
Collections: Women being awesome





	As Big as a House

When Luna Lovegood gave birth to a baby that died after two hours from her birth, she went home to her husband and her twins and rested for a week.

But Lorcan and Lysander were only three years old and they soon needed her attention.

"Are you bringing the baby back now, Mommy?" Lysander asked her at breakfast the first morning she roused herself from her bed to join them.

"No, Ly," she answered, "The baby is never coming home" and moved towards him to enfold him in her arms.

But Lysander hit her with an angry fist, the blow glancing off the sharp curve of her collarbone. She rubbed it with a sigh as he ran away from her, screaming that he hated her.

She held her collarbone as Lorcan started to wail as well and mused idly if it would hurt less if she weren't so waif like.

"You're too skinny," her Grandmother used to tease her, "You'll blow away in the wind."

She wondered what it would be like to be a force of nature, rooted and grounded in deep nourishing soil, part of a community of mychrozoids and roots that shared nutrients in times of famine, rather than feeling like a feather always blowing in the wind. But her son was screaming and beating his small fists into the unforgiving floor, his howls piercing Lorcan's softer sobs and so she left her reminiscing at the table and went to comfort him (of course, she failed miserably and he howled until Rolf wrestled him into submission and he sat hiccuping and spent in Rolf's strong arms).

She couldn’t comfort her sons, she couldn’t bring the baby sister home they’d been eagerly collecting their most precious stuffed toys for. But she could bake them their favourite cake and smother it in layers of intricately designed icing.

Lorcan smiled when he saw it, and Luna did too.

Weeks went by, fading into one another. She was constantly exhausted, her body a mess of aching muscles. Her eyes burned day and night but the tears wouldn’t shed.

She didn’t feel like chasing her children around their messy bedroom, their crowded living room littered with stray toys and Rolf's hand carved wooden puzzles, she didn’t want to hunt frogs or capture silver wriggling minnows. She sent them out with Rolf and spent her time baking cookies and tarts and cakes, rich and dense and heavy.

She had no energy at all and slept late into the mornings, leaving Rolf to dress the twins and feed them breakfast as she huddled under layers of soft blankets. It was months later when she realized that she really couldn’t imagine doing the things that she used to do with ease; skiing through dense layers of snow to hunt nargles, or chasing wrackspurts through the air on her broom were unthinkable to her now, a dream of childhood that had leached all its brilliant colour, leaving her only with a faded memory of the things she used to love, the things she used to find herself capable of doing.

She ran a spoon through the sticky pudding she’d concocted and watched it slowly dribble into the bowl.

“There is still sweetness in life for me,” she whispered as she watched it trickle down the spoon.

None of her clothes fit her anymore. They pressed against her stomach, strangled her chest. She had expanded them bigger so many times that they were threadbare, and she had to buy new ones.

“Do you want to come join us, love?” Rolf asked her as they ate breakfast together one morning, waffles and eggs and sausages and fruit on tiny platters. “We’re going to go swimming out at the creek today.”

“No thank you,” Luna answered, drizzling chocolate on the fruit in intricate patterns. “I’ve got to watch the bread that’s in the oven.”

“Come, love,” Rolf whispered to her, grabbing her elbow in a desperate grip as the twins ran to put on their swim shorts, “You can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?” Luna asked, and went to collect the breakfast dishes.

The twins were due to start their early years education that fall and Luna and Rolf walked them to the plain brick building in the centre of town together, the twins laughing and running in excitement up and down the sidewalk, testing their balance walking one foot in front of the other on the curb and tumbling off in a laughing heap. They shared kisses and took photos and when Luna and Rolf went back home together, the house was quiet and solemn in the fall light.

Rolf stood by the door, squeezing Luna’s hand.

“Come love,” he said, “come and let’s make recordings of the butterflies together. We still don’t understand their migration patterns.”

Luna slipped out of his grip and sank deeper into the darkened house.

“I have reading to get caught up on,” she said, and she thought she saw his face crumble in the mirror across from the door as she slid past it. But she kept walking, wondering if she could bury herself in fantastic stories of dragons and knights in shining armour while she pretended to do research.

Winter died into spring and with spring came a celebration.

Ginny was having a baby shower for her first girl, and Hermione had insisted she accompany her. Hermione showed up at the door of their small stone cottage with an extra present in hand and pushed her way by Rolf’s outstretched arms, marched into Luna's room and threw the covers off of her bed.

“You’re coming,” she said, throwing cleaning spells over Luna’s still prone form. “She’s your best friend.”

Luna considered the fire in Hermione’s eyes and sighed, recognizing when she was defeated.

“All right,” she grumbled, and Hermione spelled her unwashed hair into a tight, spiralling bun while Luna tried to find a pair of clean robes.

Parvati greeted Hermione with a squeal of joy and threw her arms around her, babbling small talk as she took their presents and coats.

Her eyes searched Luna’s face, questioning and reserved, and then her eyes flew wide open.

“Luna Lovegood?” she gasped, “Why you’re big as a house!”

“Parvati!” Hermione hissed, and elbowed her as Luna considered this, following them through the crowded entranceway and into the high-ceilinged living room, where presents and treats and sparkling grape juice sat in heaps between the chatting women.

She wondered if her bones could be bedframes for her twin’s bodies, if her arms could grow wide enough to be their shelter. She imagined the twins considered her as essential and unshakeable as the house they lived in, expanding bigger and bigger as they grew, to accommodate their increasing wildness, their need for space to ramble.

Ginny smiled with proud crinkles around her eyes, and the women drew close around her, giggling and oohing and ahhing as she unwrapped her presents.

Hermione had gifted Ginny a sweet pink knit jumper in Luna’s name; perfect and whimsical and exactly the sort of thing that Luna would have chosen out herself.

“Thanks Luna!” Ginny exclaimed, hugging her in her quick arms, and Luna smiled vaguely and slipped away as soon as she could to the toilets.

Luna’s mind was elsewhere, far away from the party and the cooing women, the tales of babies and husbands a mere buzz in the background.

Luna was wondering if she could perfect a fudge recipe that had been bothering her for days.

She took out the wrapped fudge from her purse and bit into it, face first, no mucking around with cutting tiny bits from it, pretending she could conserve it.

The fudge was creamy and satisfying and nutty, but it was lacking a certain ineffable quality, and couldn’t quite satiate her. She ate all of it, wondering what was missing, if she needed more vanilla or if sea salt would be the needed contrast to the chocolate. She realized suddenly that she couldn’t eat another bite. Her stomach rebelled against the onslaught of sugar, and she couldn’t stop herself from vomitting.

A knock on the door.

Luna turned the taps on to cover the noise of wretching.

“Luna?” it was Hermione, uncertain. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Luna called back, and splashed cold water on to her face. “Just fine.”

She wrenched open the door, and took in the sight of Hermione staring at her, concern writing lines on her face.

“I’m fine,” she said, and walked back towards the party, Hermione trailing, frowning after her.

Rolf left her just after summer was drawing to a close.

“You’ve become a ghost,” he said, his eyes full of a sorrow that probably should have registered. “And I can’t live with that anymore, Luna.”

He seemed to want to say more, to hold her hands more tightly as he studied her, but Luna couldn’t bear the tears that shimmered in his eyes.

She pulled away from him, from the callouses on his hands. She wondered why, suddenly, she’d always seen him as so big, when really her own size was now nearly double his.

“You’ve already made up your mind,” she said, “Don’t make this any harder.” And she turned away, away from his shimmering eyes and his pleading look, and his empty hands, hanging now, open and listless by his sides.

Luna discovered then as the children began their primary schooling that she did not want to be as big as a house. Her ambition now was to be an entire planet.

She wanted to have a gravitational pull, to be so weighty that foreign bodies were drawn towards her, wrested to her in an inevitability of collision or contact.

“Gravity,” she whispered as she lay down in the frost-bitten earth, the grass frozen clumps sharpened beneath her as she stared at the stars one night, “weight.”

Her body felt heavy indeed, like she could barely struggle in breaths under the pressure of the mass she now carried, sitting leaden on her chest. All her former sharpness had been smoothed over, covered and held in layers of protective fat.

She bought a television and thought that the school day did not really have enough hours for all the time she needed to lose herself in front of it.

The Great Barrier Reef was dying.

Oh, they called it a bleaching event, but as Luna watched footage after footage of the colours of life draining from the reefs, the fish and sharks and clams and mollusks and sponges and octopus and eels and crustraceons and anemones fleeing with the sharp greens and mellow yellows and rose-pinks, she knew that it was dying.

She watched, transfixed, as everything that she loved and played in and admired faded to a slimy dust that broke apart in a diver’s fingers. She learned words like global warming, and cascading effects and ecological collapse, but really, she understood them near intuitively.

As she continued to expand, she began to fade at her edges. She could no longer tell where she began and where this dying world ended, her outline blurring into the air. Her children could not get a firm grip around her, as she melted into the world around her, her boundaries melding, transluscent as she grew yet bigger.

“This is too much!” Hermione cried at her, her voice a note of shrill worry, “your heart won’t be able to bear this!”

Indeed it can’t, Luna agreed, watching as Hermione sorted through her overflowing fridge, her overstocked larders, pilfering all the hard work she had achieved.

Luna had to cast silencing charms at night as in her sleep, she emitted music instead of the soft sounds of snoring. She had become a human theremin, eerie and melodious and whining piteous notes in the dark of night.

She dreamed one night that she was in a meadow, invisible as she watched a man with dark hair and eyes walking through it. His skin was bronze, his expression sorrowful. He was throwing seeds from a leather bag tied around his waist, his clothes home-spun rough linen died an indigo blue.

“Meaningless, meaningless,” he cried out across the meadow as he scattered his seeds, “Everything is meaningless!”

The seasons changed from spring to summer to fall and winter, the plants growing up and then wizening, collapsing back to the earth as he walked across the meadow.

The next day as Luna sat in her reinforced sofa, watching the television on a nature channel she stumbled across a news segment about an orca carrying the weight of its dead baby on its back.

She thought of the mumus she bought, how Lorcan told her derisively she had become a whale, his fists clenched tight and white, his jaw set.

She heaved herself from the couch and made her way towards the fireplace, sprinkling shimmering green powder into the flames.

“Rolf,” she cried, and was unsurprised when his face popped up but a few minutes later. “You’re going to take the boys tonight,” she informed him, and walked away as soon as he nodded at her.

She Apparated over several days towards the Pacific North-West ocean. She felt like an iron filing, the eye of the orca the magnet which drew her in.

She stood by the shore of the Haida Gwaii islands and watched the waves roll in, beating against the rocks of the shore one after the other after the other.

She waded into the ocean, its cold embrace shocking her as she stumbled deeper and deeper. The waves were powerful, but she was pulled in a rip tide quickly out into the sea, until she was surrounded by dangerous blue-back waves all around her.

She sighed a long sigh and thought of the orca, of her deep black eye.

She transformed into the body of a whale, invisible, and swam towards the magnet she felt pulling at her.

She found the mother carrying the dead body of her calf, nudging it with gentle touches of her nose towards the surface, towards the air.

Luna swam underneath the mother, supporting her.

They travelled for days like this, and Luna found she could commune beyond the short whistles and tense bubbles, beyond the dance of body and fin, looking into the mother’s eye.

How long, she asked the mother silently as she watched her body grow lean from a lack of food or rest. How long?

As long as I need to, the mother answered, and Luna felt she understood this.

They were not enough fish to catch, not enough salmon to satiate them on this long unyielding wake as they travelled slowly southward, the weight of the baby on the mother’s back, her refusing to drop it to its death in the depths of the sea.

Indigenous fishermen had been feeding the orca their own salmon catch, trying to save the great whales from starvation, but they couldn’t find all the whales in the ocean.

Luna decided, lacking salmon, that she would become a scavenger, and ate indiscriminately; birds, and fish and plastic food and beverage containers. She wondered if her body, even in its whale form, had some kind of magical alchemy that could transform the waste into nourishment.

And if she didn’t eat it all, who or what would?

The ocean was swimming with waste. Luna took it all in to her, body and mind; thinking of the great dead spots in the oceans, the death of the reefs, the collapse of all the systems of interconnected life that sustained and delighted her and all of humanity and their metamorphosis into a broken pile of slimy toxic tar.

After 13 long days and nights, as many days and nights as moons in the year, the mother whale allowed the small, now decomposing body to drop below the surface and be taken into the dark embrace of the depths of the ocean.

Luna transformed back into her human form almost without intending to, shivering and aching.

She reached out one hand towards the great orca’s cheek, but dared not to touch the smooth expanse before her.

What now, human witch? the orca asked her, flashing at her the great yellowing teeth that could easily crush the bones of her forearm in one quick snap. You who have witnessed the destruction of sacred life on this planet.

Luna considered this question, the blood pounding warm in her ears, the plastic she had swallowed a twisting pain in her guts.

This world is dying and cannot remain as it is, Luna answered. And so I will become a midwife and bring her shuddering through the last dying light of this destruction until we birth a new world. And I will usher her in, and tend her, and care for her.

The orca nodded, satisfied, and clacked her teeth shut.

Go then, the orca told her, become a mother of our nations.

And the great orca dived deep into the sea, leaving Luna alone and shivering.

There was only one hope for her, only one chance before the cold took her, and Luna screwed up all her courage, and Apparated home.

She woke up lying in her bed, staring at the ceiling. The house was silent and dark around her.

She shivered and roused herself from bed, walked to the empty fireplace and began to build a fire.

“Mother of the nations,” she whispered, just to see what it sounded like on her tongue. “Mother of our nations.”


End file.
